DSL stripped for application server duty

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL stripped for application server duty
started by: stubble

Posted by stubble on Aug. 03 2006,01:00

{Background}

I'm looking to implement a server, and I think DSL may be just what I need. But the box has limited resources (64MB IDE-CF card, 256MB ram), so I need to thin out the image. My software is about 20MB of perl code and associated modules.

I'd like to put a stripped DSL + my software on the CF card. I'd use a 128MB ramdisk for temp disk space. The ramdisk does not need to persist.

{My questions}

1. Is DSL the right tool?

2. How do I remove packages (such as games) from frugal and then remaster?

3. I believe I'll need two partitions on my CF card, one for DSL and one for my application, is this correct? Should I partition before the Frugal installation?

Any help or pointers to documentation that might help me will be much appreciated. I just feel like I'm missing something. Thanks in advance.

Posted by Del on Aug. 03 2006,04:12

I'd suggest just remastering DSL to fit your needs. Search the forum for remaster, there's a buttload of info to be found. Using a "real" machine (plenty o' ram, decent proc) strip out what you don't need/want (fluxbox, X), add what you do want (ie latest perl, apache) and your 20Mb of programming. Don't remove the frugal install script, you'll want it to install to your CF disk. Wrap it up in it's own custom .iso. Boot the server machine from that CD, frugal install to the CF card (only one partition is needed) and you're good to go. You can still use the regular DSL "cheatcode" boot options to set ramdisk size, and you're software is located in the KNOPPIX image thus "immune" to being overwritten/hacked.